forceful. The rabbit or the partridge is not coaxed or lured. It has no hand in the matter, but is merely terrorized and compelled. Hunting, he considered to be open to the same charge, but also to be still less dignified, because man resigns his headship to the dogs, or, at anyrate, becomes a partner on no equal terms with hound and horse. Human prerogatives he felt to be thus impaired by this sport. Here, cousin Hilda, who has a very pretty seat upon her jennet, murmured some gentle remonstrance, but the sage heeded her not. He was praising angling as against football, polo, cricket, or hockey, because it is without any competitive, or emulous elements. Man is not pitted against man, (unless in those spurious and mock encounters, organised by Birmingham publicans, called fishing competitions, abominations he would not even name). A young man, who introduced a competitive element into an angling party, by giving us marks, (ten for the first, ten for the largest, ten for the most, and five per half-brace) he held to be no true angler, but a man of a merely legal spirit. He himself would not allow it to be put about that he had landed a four-pound chub, (which out At the end of the weighed by seven ounces the next largest caught hereabouts this season) because he pulled caps with no man. day, he was all for pooling the catch and dividing equally, as far as might be. At this point the dubbin suggested to my fair cousin to offer a pair of house-shoes to our friend, but he declined them with much innocent simplicity. Then he began to talk about the angling of the ancients, of Egyptians upon mats, with eight-foot rods and double lines, catching monsters on large coarse hooks, with baits laid right on the bottom. Ti of Sakkara managed to harpoon a hippopotamus with one hand, and to angle with the other, if his picture is to be believed: but Paheri, of El Kab, used the Seine net only, and kippered his catch. Personally I always resent Egyptology as an intrusion upon the omniscience of our classical preceptors. "Come sir!" I said, "If angling goes back to old Homer it is antient enough for me. Did he know anything about it?" What? he answered; have you forgotten Scylla and how she snatched six sailors from the swift ship of Odysseus, and what he says? σκεψάμενος δ ̓ ἐς νῆα θοὴν ἅμα καὶ μεθ ̓ ἑταίρους Od. XII, 247.* You see, Homer knew sea-fishing with a long rod, and his hooks were of horn, and evidently small, for little fish. That is an improvement upon Egyptian methods. In the Fourth book too, the comrades of Menelaus were always angling in Pharos. αἰεὶ γὰρ περὶ νῆσον ἁλώμενοι ἰχθυάασκον γναμπτοῖς ἀγκίστροισιν. † but this was for hunger more than for sport, for Homer, as Plato notices in the Republic, *And looking into the swift ship to find my men, even then I marked their feet and hands, as they were lifted up on high, and they cried aloud in their agony, and called me by my name for that last time of all. Even as when a fisher on some headland lets down with a long rod his baits for a snare to the little fishes, casting into the deep the horn of an ox of the homestead, and as he catches each, flings it writhing ashore, so writhing were they borne upward to the cliff. For they were ever roaming round the island, fishing with bent hooks. IV, 368 † IV., 404 thought meanly of fish food compared with roast meat. I confess that this, a mere argument from silence, does not impress me, for the great Plato looked with some disfavour upon angling. It was not strenuous enough for him. There is a passage in the Laws I should like to discuss with you if you can reach me down the volume. It is much misunderstood.* He is speaking about sport in education. "O friends would that neither the desire nor the passion for sea hunting might ever take hold of you, neither of the hooking nor of the slaughter of the water creatures with weels that neither wake nor sleep, which work a lazy hunting."† This has been rightly quoted, as proving that Plato disliked angling, but quite contorted by applying the term "lazy hunting" to angling, whereas it applies solely to weels. Then we must not forget that the paragraph does not end here. His fear of angling is not positive but relative, lest it should disincline the youth to the more arduous sweat and toil of hunting with hounds, which it * De Legibus, VII, 823. † ὦ φίλοι εἴθ ̓ ὑμᾶς μήτε τις ἐπιθυμία μήτ ἔρως τῆς περὶ θάλατταν θήρας ποτὲ λάβοι μήτε ἐγρηγορῶσι μήτε εὔδουσι κύρτοις ἀργὸν θήραν διαπονουμένοις.—STALLBAUM. certainly does as Dame Juliana Berners bears witness. Anyhow Plato, to my own great relief, allows angling. "The fisherman too, may be allowed his sport in all places except harbours, sacred rivers, fens and marshes, if only he does not use the herbal defilement "—to poison the water. Plato's disparagement of angling is not hard to understand if you turn to the Sophist, for he saw in the angler a lively picture of his mortal enemy, the sophist, who caught unwary victims by guile, striking them about the head, with his deadly skill. So it is a very great concession that he allows a sport in the Laws, which he would not tolerate in his earlier writings.* But why not in harbours, marshes and fens? asked my cousin. Nominally no doubt because the fish would be less wholesome, in these places, but really because the sophists left the lean and rugged lands, the poor and the strenuous, and gathered in flocks upon the fat, rich lands-the wealthy classes. If you press me I must confess also that Plato would much prefer the * ἐνυγροθηρευτὴν δὲ πλὴν ἐν λιμέσι καὶ ἱεροῖς ποταμοῖς τε καὶ ἕλεσι καὶ λίμναις, ἐν τοῖς ἄλλοις δὲ ἐξέστω θηρεύειν, μὴ χρώμενον ὁπῶν ἀναθολώσει μόνον.—DE L., VII, 823. |